Journal Square takes
its name from Jersey City's longtime daily newspaper,The Jersey Journal,
just as Times Square in New York City is named after The New York Times.
The bright red signage atop the five-story building at 30 "Journal"
Square proudly identifies the headquarters of this mainstay of Jersey
City's political and cultural life.

John T. Rowland, Jr.,
a native of Jersey City, designed the building in 1921 at the time of
the renovation of the area for new bridges over the Pennsylvania Railroad
cut and the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (now PATH) station at Summit
Avenue. Facing north across the open plaza of Journal Square, the building
was given a prominent location in the newly reconstructed district.

Before settling in
1925 at its namesake building, the newspaper offices relocated several
times during its history. Originally published as the Evening Journal
on May 2, 1867, the newspaper started out in a small office at 13 Exchange
Place gradually expanding operations into other nearby buildings. As the
newspaper flourished, the publishers, the Evening Journal Association,
constructed a new office building in 1874. The new offices at 37 Montgomery
Street remained home to the editorial offices and production facilities
through the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1909, after almost
forty years, the Evening Journal officially changed its name
to the Jersey Journal and soon thereafter, in 1911, the paper
relocated almost two miles west to a new office at the northeast corner
of Bergen and Sip Avenues. The structure was demolished to create the
large open plaza that forms the core of Journal Square today.

Robert
Larkins, an editorial page editor, once called the Jersey Journal,
"a paper with an independent political outlook with Democratic leaning."
However, when the paper started as the Evening Journal, he describes
the paper as "the pronounced and vigorous advocate of Republican
principles and general policy of the Republican Party. It has supported
and advocated the election of the national and state candidates of that
party," wrote associate editor Alexander McLean in 1895"(Quoted
in Weiss, 1992).

The paper began as
a four-page broadsheet edition with six columns to the page. Its founders,
William Dunning and Zebina K. Pangborn, were both Republicans and former
Union Army officers. They supported the party's overall Reconstruction
program of the Republican Party and its civil rights program of equal
rights for African-Americans, but they took an independent editorial stand
against the arrival of Irish Catholics into the city. Active in city politics,
Pangborn served as the chairman of the 1870 city charter commission.

In 1908, the editor Joseph A. Dear renamed the newspaper the Jersey
Journal. During his tenure, the newspaper gave witness to the rise
of Jersey City's most controversial political figure, Democratic Party
"boss" Mayor
Frank Hague. The Journal initially supported Hague as a reform
candidate in 1913 and backed his successful campaign to change Jersey
City from a mayor-city council form of government to a commission form
of government that brought him to power under New Jersey's Walsh Act of
1911. It supported Hague in his election campaign for mayor in 1921 and
again in 1925, but opposed his reelection in 1929.

Dear was succeeded as editor
by his sonJoseph
A. Dear II. A graduate of the Hasbrouck Institute in 1889 and Princeton
in 1893, he was appointed for three terms to the New Jersey Court of Errors
and Appeals (1926-1944) under New Jersey's Constitution of 1844. Like
his father, he supported Republican politics but also wrote editorials
favoring the progressive reform ideas of Woodrow Wilson, such as the Walsh
Act for municipal government reform and the formation of the League of
Nations after World War I. Under Dear II's editorship, the Journal
began to challenge Mayor Hague's tactics and referred to his supporters
as "Hague's Hoodlums" in both words and political cartoons.
Hague reacted by attempting to bring the presses to a halt with tactics
that included interference with newspaper sales, advertising, and distribution,
as well as raising its tax assessment in 1926 by $175,000. Hague even
wanted to rename Journal Square "Veterans Square" in retaliation
for the paper's endorsement of his political opponent in the mayoralty
election of 1929, but the name was too entrenched in city's frame of reference.
Dear II also supported the Case-McAllister Committee investigation of
Hague in 1928 and 1929. It reported that Hague had interfered with a Republican
primary for a state senate seat and questioned Hague's personal finances
and use of public funds. His last editorial for the Jersey Journal
was "Hang Hitler," written in 1939.

According to Jersey
Journal reporter Peter Weiss, the paper's general support of Democratic
politics came during the Depression era and its reform policies. After
Hague's tenure, the Jersey Journal supported his nephew Frank Hague
Eggers for mayor and opposed the successful candidate John V. Kenny. In
1950 the Jersey Journal campaigned against the commission form
of government that brought Hague to power and advocated a return to the
mayor-council form of government, which was adopted. When a return to
the commission form of government was again suggested in 1982, the Jersey
Journal defended the status quo.

In 1945, S.I. Newhouse,
Sr., bought the Jersey Journal from the Dear family. Today it is
one of the newspapers published by the Newhouse-owned Advance Publications
that includes The Star-Ledger and numerous daily and weekly newspapers.
Newhouse began his vast newspaper holdings with its purchase of the Staten
Island Advance and Ledger of Essex County in 1935. The Jersey
Journal then purchased the daily Jersey Observer in 1951 and
the Bayonne Times in 1971. The Observer or "The
Obie" began as a weekly in 1892 in Hoboken and was the Hudson
Observer from 1911 to 1924. To reflect the merger, the masthead of
the Jersey Journal was changed to the Jersey Journal and Jersey
Observer in 1998. When theHudson
Dispatch closed in 1991, the Journal began a Hudson
Dispatch edition.

The last ten years
have brought changes to Jersey City's daily newspaper. The printing of
the newspaper moved from 30 Journal Square to the Bergen Record's Commercial
Printing facility in Rockaway, NJ, in 1996 to allow for color printing.
It also began publishing a Spanish-language weekly newspaper, El Nuevo
Hudson, in recognition of the city's growing Hispanic population to
28 per cent and today has a readership of approximately 60,000. The newspaper
may also be accessed electronically on the Internet and began publication
of the local weeklies, The Bayonne Journal, Kearny Journal,
and Waterfront Journal in 2002.

More recently, however,
the Jersey Journal's future has been threatened with problems related
to a reduction in circulation from as many as 100,000 newspapers a day
in 1970 to approximately 40,000 and a loss of advertising revenue. In
March 2002 negotiations between Newhouse owners and unions representing
the employees prevented a shut down of the newspaper's operations.

On April 25, 2005,
the Jersey Journal published its first tabloid edition of the paper,
abandoning its broadsheet format after 138 years and following the trend
for tabloids in urban communities.